If I were Sen. Bill Nelson ... (updated x2)

... I wonder how I would feel about the home page of the WaPo's opinion section just now.

Sen. Ben Nelson is probably not crazy about the op-ed itself, but that's in the normal sphere of political disagreement. Wonder how long it will stay this way on the site, having been up there overnight.

(To spell it out: the very negative-toned headline refers to the wrong guy. Second paragraph of the article: "Such was the case in the final hours of Senate Majority Leader Harry
Reid's successful attempt to get cloture on health-care reform. Sen.
Ben Nelson of Nebraska, the last Democratic holdout,..." Thanks to reader EG.)

Update: Checking back a few hours later (11:20am), the mistake is still there on the WaPo's home "Opinion" page. I don't mean to go crazy on the "are there no copy editors?" theme, but again this genuinely surprises me: That the nation's leading newspaper of politics, in the top-most item on its main opinion page, would make a highly embarrassing error in a highly insulting headline about the major political news of the moment - and no one would fix it. We all make errors; I have put up more embarrassing typo-marred items than I would like. But how many people at the Post have to have seen the site by this point (including the author of the piece) - without any of them saying, Ooops?? I can't imagine that if the main page of the sports site said in its lead headline that "George Allen" was going to be the new general manager of the Redskins, rather than his son Bruce Allen, the error would stay up there for hours. (Or more plausibly George Allen Jr, rather than his brother Bruce.) But then, I couldn't imagine that the "Bill Nelson" item would stay up uncorrected either.

Oh well. Back to work, and Merry Christmas!

Update #2: Just now, 11:35 or so, I see that it is fixed. Never mind!

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James Fallows is a staff writer for The Atlantic and has written for the magazine since the late 1970s. He has reported extensively from outside the United States and once worked as President Carter's chief speechwriter. He and his wife, Deborah Fallows, are the authors of the new book Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey Into the Heart of America, which has been a New York Times best seller and is the basis of a forthcoming HBO documentary.